Dark money meets medieval thought in this intriguing exposé of American Catholicism and its rightist discontents.
A close-up study of the once-unlikely wedding of the Catholic right with hardcore Protestant advocates of small government and White supremacy.
The Catholic vote is important, writes journalist McConahay, author of The Tango War: 75% turned out in 2016, “and since 1952, their vote usually goes to the winning presidential candidate.” In 2016, that meant Trump, who, for all his irreligious behavior, commanded the allegiance of a large number of American priests and bishops—and not solely because of the abortion issue. The rightward turn, which, the author notes, puts many members of the American Catholic hierarchy against the views of the current pope, dates back to the Reagan era, when Catholic activist Paul Weyrich forged an alliance with the evangelical right, with Jerry Falwell’s so-called Moral Majority (a term coined by Weyrich) leading the charge to pull down the wall separating church and state. In another unholy alliance, right-wing Catholics also made common cause with the Koch brothers, who, though professing no objections to same-sex marriage or abortion, shared their hatred for government intervention in business and social issues. McConahay examines the Catholic connection with such prominent right-wing actors as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his Trump-adherent wife, a Catholic convert, along with forerunners such as Phyllis Schlafly and Richard Viguerie. Ironies abound, not least Catholic support for Trump against fellow religionist Joseph Biden and the widespread episcopal rejection of science to resist vaccinations and climate change programs, to say nothing of their dismissal of the notion that women can ever serve as priests or deacons. In this searching yet occasionally heavy-handed investigation, McConahay concludes—as have many before her—that the trajectory of the American Catholic Church may one day lead to a schism with Rome—backed, of course, by White nationalist dollars.
Dark money meets medieval thought in this intriguing exposé of American Catholicism and its rightist discontents.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781685890285
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
